Humanists International

Humanists International is not a body one joins. It is a federation of organisations, around a hundred and twenty of them, in more than sixty countries, with no individual membership, which means that any figure purporting to give the number of humanists in the world is not one it produces or could produce.

It was founded at Amsterdam in 1952 as the International Humanist and Ethical Union, bringing together five existing national humanist and ethical groups, with Julian Huxley, the Dutch philosopher Jaap van Praag and the British humanist Harold Blackham as its principal figures. Van Praag was its first chair. It took its present name in 2019.

Its statement of principles is the Amsterdam Declaration, adopted at that founding congress, revised in 2002, and revised again in 2022 for the federation's seventieth anniversary. It is the nearest thing organised humanism has to a creed, and it is written with visible care not to be one: it sets out humanism as ethical, rational, democratic and non-theistic, insists that it is a life stance rather than a dogma, and commits to the free expression of dissent from itself.

The revisions are informative in their own right. A movement that rewrites its founding statement every twenty years is either unstable or serious about the claim that convictions should follow evidence, and the substance of the changes suggests the second.

Its member bodies range from national organisations with parliamentary influence to small groups operating in places where being openly non-religious is dangerous, and the federation's work reflects both ends of that range.

The federation's principal practical output is the Freedom of Thought Report, published annually since 2012, which assesses the treatment of the non-religious in every country in the world on a scale running from free and equal to grave violations. It is a standard reference on blasphemy and apostasy laws and is cited well outside the humanist movement.

What it documents is not an abstraction. Apostasy remains a capital offence in law in a small number of states, blasphemy is criminal in a much larger number, and non-believers in many countries face family and community sanction that no law addresses. The federation runs casework alongside the reporting, assisting non-religious people fleeing persecution, and it holds consultative status at the United Nations and other international bodies, where it is generally the only body making the argument that freedom of religion is empty unless it includes freedom from it.

Its structure is democratic: an elected board, a general assembly of member organisations, and offices in London and Washington. Its internal arguments are the kind federations have, which organisations should be admitted, and how far a movement whose common ground is a life stance should commit itself on political questions its members disagree about.

That tension is real and unresolved. A federation containing national bodies from countries where humanists are prosecuted and from countries where they are close to the cultural majority does not have a single set of interests, and its declaration is written broadly enough to hold both.